I love Pottery Barn. I know I’m a punch line. But so what, who cares? I’m a child of the eighties, so sue me. Loving Pottery Barn is such a joke that there was even a Friends episode dedicated to it. I’m a “designer”– couldn’t I get more creative than this?

I know that it would be cooler if I didn’t like it. I could make myself seem younger if I stuck to West Elm or Design Within Reach. For Christmas’s sake, even Crate and Barrel would be more palatable.  It would be preferable if I scoured flea markets with an eye for the eclectic, or had the cash flow to decorate my house in a more minimalist modern style, but what can I say? The Pottery Barn catalog fills my brain with potent house decorating fantasies. They are so strong, that sometimes I feel like I actually own a house on a beach where I throw casually elegant brunches every Sunday and toil on nothing more troubling than a 3-item to-do list and a crafting project. If I find myself straining to read a small line of print, a giant magnifying glass is always within reach.

But lately I feel like Pottery Barn is a boy I’ve been dating for years: a jerky preppy jock, perhaps–popular in the extreme, but pretends to like indie rock to give him an edge. I’ve wasted years following him around like a puppy only to realize that I know everything about this boy, but sadly, the boy knows NOTHING about ME.

For example, I have never written a To-Do list on a chalkboard. And IF I had written a to-do list, it would not have three duncey-dumby things on it. My to-do list is so long,  I don’t have time to write it on a chalkboard. I don’t have the wall space for a chalkboard! I don’t need to need chalk, because then I’d need to write on the chalk board “BUY CHALK” and that would be a real shame, let alone a closed circuit of supply and demand.

I have shoes, coats, bags and lunch boxes. My entryway is not filled with rocks, pottery and artfully arranged firewood. Come to think of it, I don’t even have a fireplace, you asshole, and you’d know that if you ever bothered to come to MY house for a change.

I have a computer with lots of cables. When I work late at night, my desk is littered with dirty dishes, coffee mugs, an empty beer bottle or two, some kid toys, and some old cough drops. Not stacks of books, beautiful note cards and apothecary jars filled with objets d’art, n’est ce pas? If I had a writing desk, it wouldn’t look anything like the ones your catalog photographers so lovingly memorialize.

I have innumerable unmentionables that I need to hide under my bathroom sink. I’m not going to over-share, ’cause I ain’t that kind of dame, but for the love of embarrassing toiletries, please stop showcasing open shelving for the commode.

I  have a backyard. I am lucky. BUT, but, but. It is not an outdoor screening room.  And if it was, I wouldn’t want to watch an old, dumb movie about an old, dumb pickup truck on an old-time road to nowhere. I don’t have an electric outlet back there to plug in the projector, the Christmas tree lights, the rattan pendant lights (nor the New York City permit to string them up and operate them), all-weather ground beds, or the wherewithal to schedule 3-4 hours of my time making popcorn and funneling it carefully into tiny paper cones for my guests, who are all of your friends anyway. And now that we’re on the subject–I find your friends to be a bunch of BORING foodies–all they talk about is wine and flavor profiles like an army of lobotomized morons from wine country.

So I guess my only question to you,  Pottery Barn, is: do you even know who I am? Have you been listening to anything I have ever said? When do I get to pick the restaurant? The rock show? The movie? Pottery Barn, look, you’re really cute in a kind of pre-Dancing-With-Wolves-Kevin-Costner-kind-of- way, but I just don’t think this is working anymore. Goodbye. I love you and I always will.